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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#361

Post by cdf »

spongebobstoes wrote: post #269
tgbugs wrote: post #199

One way to work around the heat dissipation issues in space (and also on earth) is to move to computing systems that operate entirely at cryogenic temperatures to take advantage of superconducting circuitry. I've heard stories that over a decade ago teams inside hyperscalars had calculated that running completely cryogenically cooled data centers would be vastly cheaper than what we do now due to savings on resistive…

by my calculations, the heat dissipation isn't that big a deal take an h100 for example. it will need something like 1kW to operate. that's less than 4 square meters of solar panel at 70C, a reasonable temp for H100, a 4 square meter radiator can emit north of 2kW of energy into deep space seems to me like a 2x2x2 cube could house an H100 in space perhaps I'm missing something?

The typical GPU cloud machine will have 8 H100s in a box. I didnt check your math but if a single machine needs 32 square meter radiator, 200 machines will probably be the size comparable to the ISS.

How much does it cost to launch just the mass of something that big?

Do you see how unrealistic this is?

Given that budget, I can bundle in a SMR nuclear reactor and still have change left.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#362

Post by matt-p »

beloch wrote: post #115

I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…

(DTC) Datacentres take electricity and turn it into low grade heat e.g 60c water. Put them anywhere where you've either got excess (cheap) energy or where you can use the heat. Either is fine, both is great, but neither is both bad and current standard practice.

It's perfectly possible to put small data centres in city centres and pipe the heat around town, they take up very very little space and if you're consuming the heat, you don't need the noisy cooling towers (Ok maybe a little in summer).

Similarly if you stick your datacentre right next to a big nuclear power plant, nobody is even going to notice let alone care.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#363

Post by gordian-mind »

Three counterpoints:

1) Kessler syndrome is a contingency.

2) This is a logistics issue, not a physical impossibility.

3) Those are different tradeoffs (solar in space). There is not really an argument there.

All in all this is extremely weak reasoning, which is quite the contrast with the definitive title.

I throw this to the "nerds need to feel smarter than Elon" pile of articles. :)

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#364

Post by markhahn »

gpt5 wrote: post #235
lancewiggs wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exiting the 5th best social network and the 10th (or worse) best AI company and selling them to a decent company. It probably increases Elon's share of the combined entity. It delivers on a promise to investors that he will make money for them, even as the underlying businesses are lousy.

I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility? A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rou…

50MW is on the small side for an AI cluster - probably less than 50k gpus.

if the current satellite model dissipates 5kW, you can't just add a GPU (+1kW). maybe removing most of the downlink stuff lets you put in 2 GPUs? so if you had 10k of these, you'd have a pretty high-latency cluster of 20k GPUs.

I'm not saying I'd turn down free access to it, but it's also very cracked. you know, sort of Howard Hughesy.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#365

Post by undersuit »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #191
iknowstuff wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember how he argued for Tesla’s Solarcity acquisition because solar roofs? Data centers in space are the same kind of justification imo.

Solar roofs are much more practical to be honest.

Putting solar roofs on a building? For a car company?

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#366

Post by philipwhiuk »

elamje wrote: post #353

I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me. 1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive 2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space? 3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire t…

> Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.

They don't do RAD hardening on chips these days, they just accept error and use redundant CPUs.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#368

Post by javascriptfan69 »

gpt5 wrote: post #235
lancewiggs wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exiting the 5th best social network and the 10th (or worse) best AI company and selling them to a decent company. It probably increases Elon's share of the combined entity. It delivers on a promise to investors that he will make money for them, even as the underlying businesses are lousy.

I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility? A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rou…

Starlink provides a service that couldn't exist without the satellite infrastructure.

Datacenters already exist. Putting datacenters in space does not offer any new capabilities.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#369

Post by gordian-mind »

youarentrightjr wrote: post #108
mhh__ wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.

> Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy. Have you ever spoken to someone who works at SpaceX? I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip through the company. The overwhelming consensus is that - in meetings, you nod along and tell Elon "great idea". Immediately after you get back to…

Any cool kid in uni has had the same views as you do for ten years.

What do you and them know that the countless extremely successful engineers who actually worked with Elon do not?

https://erik-engheim.medium.com/is-elon-musk-just-a-sales-gu...

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